The Stoa Consortium

Conference: CAA 2010
XXXVIII Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology “Fusion of Cultures”

Conference Dates: April 6-9, 2010
Conference Location: Granada, Spain
URL: http://www.caa2010.org

Upcoming Deadlines:

- Session proposals submission deadline November 15, 2009
- Round tables proposals submission deadline December 15, 2009
- Workshops proposals submission deadline January 31, 2010

Other importat dates:
- Full papers submission will be open on November 20th,2009
- Full papers submission deadline December 15, 2009
- Short papers submission deadline January 31, 2010
- Poster submission deadline January 31, 2010
- Virtual theatre videos submission deadline January 31, 2010

The XXXVIII Annual CAA Conference will be held in Granada, Spain, from April 6 to 9, 2010 and is expected to bring together archaeologist, computer scientist and mathematicians to explore and exchange knowledge in order to enhance our understanding of the past. Classical disciplines like archaeology, anthropology or geography, and more modern ones like computer science, geomatics or museology exchange their most recent advances during the conference.
CAA 2010 is inspired in the concept “Fusion of Cultures” that identifies the scope of the conference and the spirit of the historical city of Granada. The aim of the conference is to create an collaborative atmosphere among all disciplines, by participating via papers, posters, round tables, workshops, short papers and a novel virtual theatre non-stop show. Read the rest of this entry »

Workshop: Host your texts on Google in one day

The Center For Hellenic Studies will conduct a one-day workshop at the Center’s Washington, D.C., campus, on Monday, Jan. 11, 2010, with the  subject: “Host your texts on Google in one day”. Bring one or more XML texts to the workshop in the morning, and leave in the afternoon with a running Google installation of Canonical Text Services serving your texts to the internet (http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/cts).

For more information, including how to apply, please see http://chs75.harvard.edu/CTSWorkshop.html.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested.

Forwarded from DH2010 committee:

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference.

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Digital Humanities 2010
Call for Papers
Abstract Deadline: Oct. 31, 2009

Proposals must be submitted electronically using the system which will be available at the conference web site from October 8th. Presentations may be any of the following:

• Single papers (abstract max of 1500 words)
• Multiple paper sessions (overview max of 500 words)
• Posters (abstract max of 1500 words)

Call for Papers Announcement

The International Programme Committee invites submissions of abstracts of between 750 and 1500 words on any aspect of humanities computing, broadly defined to encompass the common ground between information technology and problems in humanities research and teaching. We welcome submissions in all areas of the humanities, particularly interdisciplinary work. We especially encourage submissions on the current state of the art in humanities computing, and on recent developments.

Suitable subjects for proposals include, for example,

* text analysis, corpora, language processing, language learning
* IT in librarianship and documentation
* computer-based research in cultural and historical studies
* computing applications for the arts, architecture and music
* research issues such as: information design and modelling; the cultural impact of the new media
* the role of digital humanities in academic curricula

The special theme of the 2010 conference is cultural heritage old and new.

Read the rest of this entry »

As Gregg Schwendner pointed out a few weeks ago on the What’s New in Papyrology blog, Brill have brought out a new CD-ROM version of the Berichtigungsliste der Griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus Ägypten (vol I-XI). From the publisher’s website:

With the advent of the CD-ROM edition of the great Berichtigungsliste der Griechisen Papyruskunden aus Ägypten, all the scholarship in the field, meticulously assembled over eighty years, is instantly accessible using a wide range of quick-search criteria. There is no better, faster, more satisfactory way to ensure a solid grounding in the corrections of readings and datings, as well as supplementary information, as this work has appeared in a wide spectrum of publications.

A license for the CD-Rom costs €149.00 / US$209.00 for an individual user; €395.00 / US$549.00 for an institutional license (1-3 users). I’m not entirely clear whether the purchase of one license lasts for life, or whether it needs to be renewed periodically as with the TLG (if the former, then presumably updated CD-ROMs would need to be purchased anew in future).

I’m curious to know, from anyone who has seen this resource, or who has access to it in their institutional library, what sorts of research question one can ask of the BL database that could not also be answered by Open Access resources such the Papyrological Navigator, for example (or the various other papyrological metadata databases at Heidelberg, Leuven, etc.). The Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri includes some readings and corrections from BL, although presumably not all. I’d be interested if any papyrologist could give us a brief review of the value of this new resource.

We have an immediate opening for a full-time web master / systems administrator at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

… with hundreds of thousands of digital photos.

University of Washington researchers have developed a computer system to combine tourist photos lifted from the Flickr.com photo-sharing site into a 3D digital model.  Using advanced techniques, they were able to ‘build’ a model of Rome from photos tagged with Rome or Roma in just 21 hours.

Read an article about it  here, and visit the project’s web page here.

Here’s a recent article from the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader about the activities of the EDUCE project.  It sounds like they’re at an exciting and critical point.  According to lead researcher and computer science professor Brent Seales:

“We’re starting the serious work now,” Seales said. “In a few weeks, we should know whether we’ll be able to tease out some of the writing. Seeing the text is going to be the trick, but we have some tricks of our own that we think will help.”

The story links to an informative video on YouTube, entitled “Reading the Unreadable,” apparently published in January of this year.

Call for Papers for two sessions at the Forty-Fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, held annually at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. Although it is a medieval studies conference, it’s quite broad and includes sessions ranging from the Late Antique through the Renaissance. There is a lot of really fabulous work going on in the digital classics community on both of these topics and it would be wonderful to introduce that work to medievalists who aren’t already aware of it. (Kzoo, as the event is affectionately called, is also a lot of fun. You can’t bring together 3000 medievalists in one small town without a certain amount of merrymaking.)

The Digital Medievalist Community of Practice (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) is sponsoring two sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 7-10, 2009 (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/). See below for session names and descriptions.

Please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.

Proposals must be submitted by September 15, 2009.

Paper session: The state of the art in handwriting recognition and analysis for medieval documents

Much work has been done towards automated analysis of handwritten documents, with a focus on handwriting recognition, in the last years, and some of the developments seen in OCR and layout recognition systems may be applicable to medieval studies. Further, the increasing interest in sophisticated linkages of text and image might be enhanced by developments in handwriting recognition and analysis. We welcome papers which report on work done or ongoing in these areas, or which seek to establish methodologies.

Paper session: Collaborative tools and environments for medieval scholarship

Many groups around the world are working to develop a new generation of collaborative tools and research environments, with potential wide applicability to medieval studies. This leads to questions about the nature of collaboration itself, and about useful models of collaboration. Reports form the coal face on collaborations which have, or have not, worked are welcome, as are demonstrations of tools and ruminations on the many faces of collaboration.

Again, please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.

This is copied from an announcement I received through the Exlibris listserv, and I thought readers of The Stoa would be interested as well. I’m not a big proponent of Second Life, but I do like seeing how people are coming up with interesting (and potentially useful) ways to use the technology. I feel the same way about Twitter, incidentally.

Colleagues,

Have you heard about virtual worlds? Ever wonder what how they might be used in the world of archives and special collections?

Come find out at Stanford University’s Special Collections and University Archives’ virtual “Open House” in the virtual world Second Life on Friday, July 31st from 9:00 to 11:00a.m. (PST). Drop in anytime during these hours for an overview of our new Virtual Archives which allows scholars to discover and use our primary resources in a virtual environment.

For the first time scholars and the casual passersby can walk Stanford’s closed stacks and browse some of our manuscript collections—a practice not offered in real life. Stanford’s Virtual Archive is a very small but growing subset of our deep storage facility replicated in Second Life. Patrons can open virtual Hollinger boxes and a sampling of scanned documents from the real life box will appear along with a link to that collection’s online finding aid. They can then post their reference questions on the bulletin board which sends email to our Special Collections staff. Stanford’s Virtual Archive provides access to patrons around the world without endangering the collection.

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world where more than 15 million users have created avatars–or online personas–enabling them to explore SL and interact with others from in real time. Reference in SL occurs through in-world text and voice chat as well as our reference bulletin board.

Please join us at our Open House to learn more at the following SLURL address (this is the Second Life location for the Stanford University Special Collections’ Virtual Archive): http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stanford%20University%20Libraries/85/224/33 This address launches the Second Life application from your web browser. For those not already in SL, joining is free at http://secondlife.com/ and we will be happy to help get you acclimated in-world. Look for Sicilia Tiratzo and my colleague in SL, Mollie Mavendorf. We will be on hand to demonstrate the archives site and answer your questions. We look forward to seeing you “in world” on July 31st.

Recently circulated by Joshua Sosin:

Volume 49 (2009) will be the last volume of GRBS printed on paper. Beginning with volume 50, issues will be published quarterly on-line on the GRBS website, on terms of free access. We undertake this transformation in the hope of affording our authors a wider readership; out of concern for the financial state of our libraries; and in the belief that the dissemination of knowledge should be free.

The current process of submission and peer-review of papers will continue unchanged. The on-line format will be identical with our pages as now printed, and so articles will continue to be cited by volume, year, and page numbers.

Our hope is that both authors and readers will judge this new medium to be to their advantage, and that such open access will be of benefit to continuing scholarship on Greece.

– The editors

http://www.duke.edu/web/classics/grbs

(I for one think this is great news: we know that online publications are read and cited some orders of magnitude more widely than dead tree volumes; we also know that many academic journals are largely edited, administered, peer-reviewed and proof-read by a volunteer staff of academics who see none of the profit for expensive volumes–so why not cut out the middleman and publish these high-quality products directly to the audience?)

Posted on behalf of Ben Gracy at the University of Denver: an article on an assisted transcription system that uses OCR. It sounds fascinating.

*edit: elsewhere in the article reference is made to “ancient documents and manuscripts”, which indicates that this system has been developed for handwritten materials in addition to printed… although the word “handwritten” itself doesn’t appear in the article.*

Traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems give rise to transcription problems and provide results with many errors that need to be edited afterwards. State, however, is a transcription system that integrates a series of tools with which images can be processed in order to remove noise and clean up the original image, the page structure can be detected, the text can be recognised and mistakes can be quickly and easily edited with interactive tools such as an electronic pen applied directly on the text. Andrés Marzal, one of the researchers in the project, explains: “It is a practical solution to the problem of a supervised transcription, since it shortens the most time-consuming phase, that is, editing the automatic transcription so that it is true to the original”.

http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=59622&CultureCode=en

Gorgias Press is expanding its interest in technology and classics and welcomes book proposals regarding digital classics research, for both monographs (including revised dissertations) and edited collections (based on conference sessions or otherwise). Proposals should be no more than 4 pages pdf and include contact details and a biography of the author(s), an overview of the topic and its importance, a brief description of all chapters, and a summation of how this text will relate to other texts in the field. This is an open call. Please send proposals to submissions@gorgiaspress.com.

Note that we have had to make a change to the programme for the Digital Classicist ICS seminar series.

The correct details are on the Digital Classicist website.

July 24 Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
‘Linking Archaeological Data ‘

July 31 Elton Barker (Oxford) & Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
‘Herodotos Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive’

(ie these two papers have been swapped around)

Remenber also that all presentations are podcast along with slides via an RSS feed.

We are now about to hear from the speakers in the fourth in this excellent series. For those of you that are unable to make the seminar itself, we are again recording each event and podcasting it along with slides on the DC website seminar page.

In addition to this we are also featured along with some discussion (and pix where possible) on the arts-humanities.net community blog.

We now have a Twitter hash tag (#digiclass) which means you can follow what’s new there as well. Just put #digiclass in your Twitter search box.

There are a number of sessions and individual papers that will be of interest to Digital Classicists scheduled for the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, next Tuesday-Thursday, June 23-25 at the University of Maryland. There are many, many more than I’m listing here, the complete schedule is online: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/?page_id=89

Tuesday, June 23
11-12:30

Benjamin Banneker Room
Chair: Dot Porter

Towards an Interpretation Support System for Reading Ancient Documents
Henriette Roued Olsen, Segolene Tarte, Melissa Terras, Michael Brady, Alan Bowman

Image as Markup: Adding Semantics to Manuscript Images
Hugh Cayless

Computer-Aided Palaeography, Present and Future
Peter A. Stokes

2-3:30

Margaret Brent Room
Chair: Patrick Juola

Medieval scribes in parts of speech (paper #3)
Karina van Dalen-Oskam

Benjamin Banneker Room
Chair: Paul Caton

Creating a Composite Cultural Heritage Artifact – the Digital Object
Fenella G. France, Eric F. Hansen, Michael B. Toth

On-site Scanning of 3D Manuscripts
Timothy H. Brom, James Griffioen, W. Brent Seales

The Ghost in the Manuscript: Hyperspectral Text Recovery and Segmentation
Patrick Shiel, John G. Keating, Malte Rehbein,

Juan Ramon Jimenez Room
Chair: Elisabeth Burr

Integrating Images and Text with Common Data and Metadata Standards in the Archimedes Palimpsest (paper #1)
Doug Emery, Michael B. Toth

Wednesday, June 24
11-12:30

Juan Ramon Jimenez Room
Chair: Dino Buzzetti

MAPS: Manuscript map Annotation and Presentation System
Charles van den Heuvel

Manuscript Annotation in Space and Time
Erica Fretwell

The Atlas of Early Printing: Digital History and Book History
Gregory J. Prickman

Thursday, June 25
11:00-12:30

Charles Carroll Room

Digital Classicist: Re-use of Open Source and Open Access Publications in Ancient Studies
Gabriel Bodard, C. W. Blackwell, Tobias Blanke, Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies, Mark Hedges, D. N. Smith

4:00-5:30
Charles Carroll Room

Funding the Digital Humanities
Moderator: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Discussion with officers from the NEH, Mellon, IMLS, SSHRCC (Canada), NSF, DFG (Germany), AHRC (UK)

Posters
Session #2, 3:30-4:00pm, Tuesday June 23rd

Implementing Greek Morphology
Helma Dik, Richard Whaling

Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics: Encoding Abbreviations in TEI XML Mark-up
Alpo Honkapohja

There has been a small change to the programme for the Digital Classicist/ICS Work-in-Progress seminar series.

The earlier post has been updated with the full details.
See: http://www.stoa.org/?p=909

Simon

EpiDoc Training Sessions 2009
London 20-24 July
Rome 21-25 September

The EpiDoc community has been developing protocols for the publication of inscriptions, papyri, and other documentary Classical texts in TEI-compliant XML: for details see the community website at http://epidoc.sf.net.

Over the last few years there has been increasing demand for training by scholars wishing to use EpiDoc. We are delighted to be able to announce two training workshops, which will be offered in 2009. Both will be led by Dr Gabriel Bodard. These sessions will benefit scholars working on Greek or Latin documents with an interest in developing skills in the markup, encoding, and exploitation of digital editions. Competence in Greek and/or Latin, and knowledge of the Leiden Conventions will be assumed; no particular computer skills are required.

London session, 20-24 July 2009. This will take place at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, 26-29 Drury Lane. The cost of attendance will be £50 for students; £100 for employees of universities or other non-profit institutions; £200 for employees of commercial institutions. Those interested in enrolling should apply to Dr Bodard, gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by 20 June 2009.

We hope to be able to offer some follow-up internships after the session, to enable participants to consolidate their experience under supervision; please let us know if that would be of interest to you.

Rome session, 21-25 September 2009. This will take place at the British School at Rome. Thanks to the generous support of the International Association of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, the British School and Terra Italia Onlus, attendance will be free.

Those interested in enrolling should apply to Dr Silvia Orlandi, silvia.orlandi@uniroma1.it by 30 June 2009.

Practical matters
Both courses will run from Monday to Friday starting at 10:00 am and ending at 16:00 each day.

Participants should bring a wireless-enabled laptop. You should acquire and install a copy of Oxygen *and* either an educational licence ($48) or a 30-day trial licence (free). Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use it!

International Conference

Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age

Munich, 3-4 July 2009

The conference will focus on the challenges and consequences of using IT and the internet for codicological and palaeographic research. The authors of some selected articles of an anthology to be published this summer by the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) will present and discuss their excellent research results with scholars and experts working on ancient books and manuscripts. The presentations will be given on current issues in the following fields: manuscript catalogues and descriptions, digitization of manuscripts, collaborative systems of research on manuscripts, codicological databases, manuscript catalogues, research based on digital resources, e-learning in palaeography, palaeographic databases (characters, scripts, scribes), (semi-) automatic recognition of scripts and scribes, digital tools for transcriptions, visions and prototypes of other digital tools.

A panel discussion will be held with renowned exponents in the field of codicology and palaeography and contributors of cutting edge research to get an overview of the state of the art as well as to open up new perspectives of codicological and palaeographic research in the “digital age”.

(More information including preliminary programme)

We are very pleased to announce the programme for this summer’s Digital Classicist seminar series.

Digital Classicist/ICS Work in Progress Seminar, Summer 2009

Fridays at 16:30 in STB3/6 (Stewart House), Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

(NB: July 17th seminar in British Library, 96 Euston Rd, NW1 2DW)

June 5: Bart Van Beek (Leuven)
‘Onomastics and Name-extraction in Graeco-Egyptian Papyri’

June 12: Philip Murgatroyd (Birmingham)
‘Starting out on the Journey to Manzikert: Agent-based modelling and
Mediaeval warfare logistics’

June 19: Mark Hedges & Tobias Blanke (King’s College London)
‘Linking and Querying Ancient Texts: A multi-database case study with epigraphic corpora”

June 26: Marco Büchler & Annette Loos (Leipzig)
‘Textual Re-use of Ancient Greek Texts: A case study on Plato’s works’

July 3: Roger Boyle & Kia Ng (Leeds) *NB: in room:STB 9*
‘Extracting the Hidden: Paper Watermark Location and Identification’

July 10: Cristina Vertan (Hamburg)
‘Teuchos: An Online Knowledge-based Platform for Classical Philology’

July 17: Christine Pappelau (Berlin) *NB: in British Library*
‘Roman Spolia in 3D: High Resolution Leica 3D Laser-scanner meets
ancient building structures’

July 24: Elton Barker (Oxford)
‘Herodotos Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive’

July 31: Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
‘Linking Archaeological Data’

August 7: Alexandra Trachsel (Hamburg)
‘An Online Edition of the Fragments of Demetrios of Skepsis’

ALL WELCOME

We are inviting both students and established researchers involved in the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient world to come and introduce their work. The focus of this seminar series is the interdisciplinary and collaborative work that results at the interface of expertise in Classics or Archaeology and computer Science.

The seminars will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact any of the following:
Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk
Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk
Juan.Garces@bl.uk
Simon.Mahony@kcl.ac.uk
or see the seminar website at
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2009.html

The 8th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2009) will focus particularly on the Arts, Media, and Humanities. According to the conference website (http://campwww.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/ismar09/doku.php?id=ismar09:arts_media_and_humanities_program):

ISMAR and its forerunners IWAR, ISMR and ISAR, have been the premier forums in this vital field since 1998 (http://www.ismar-conf.org). This year, we place particular emphasis on widening the scope of MR/AR toward the areas of arts, entertainment and the humanities. To this end, the “traditional” Science & Technology track will be complemented by an Arts, Media and Humanities track with its unique and separate publication. Both programs will follow ISMAR’s stringent publication requirements with reviews being provided by qualified peers from these respective disciplines.

The focus and scope of this call for participation in the Arts, Media and Humanities track are new and have different topics, reviewers and selection criteria. These will be complemented with Tutorials, Workshops, Demonstrations and Competitions will provide more opportunities for contributions and submissions.

Contact AMH@ismar09.org for further inquiry.

The InterFace 2009 2nd Call for Papers is now out. Please note that the deadline for submission (and thus attendance) is now looming!

—————

InterFace 2009: Second Call for Papers

**PLEASE NOTE – ALL PARTICIPANTS MUST PRESENT A POSTER OR LIGHTNING TALK**
**DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS MAY 1ST**

InterFace 2009:
1st National Symposium for Humanities and Technology
9-10 July, University of Southampton, UK.

http://www.interface09.org.uk

InterFace is a new type of annual event. Part conference, part workshop, part networking opportunity, it will bring together postdocs, early career academics and postgraduate researchers from the fields of Information Technology and the Humanities in order to foster cutting-edge collaboration. As well as having a focus on Digital Humanities, it will also be an important forum for Humanities contributions to Computer Science. The event will furthermore provide a permanent web presence for communication between delegates both during, and following, the conference.

Delegate numbers are limited to 80 (half representing each sector) and all participants will be expected to present a poster or a ‘lightning talk’ (a two minute presentation) as a stimulus for discussion and networking sessions.  Delegates can also expect to receive illuminating keynote talks from world-leading experts, presentations on successful interdisciplinary projects, ‘Insider’s Guides’ and workshops. The registration fee for the two-day event is £30. For a full overview of the event, please visit the website.

Confirmed Speakers

Keynote:

* Willard McCarty
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, KCL

* Dame Wendy Hall, President of the Association of Computing Machinery
University of Southampton

Insider’s Guides:

* Stephen Brown, De Montfort University
Knowledge Media Design, De Montfort University

* Ed Parsons
Geospatial Technologist, Google

* Sarah Porter
Head of Innovation, JISC

Project Showcase:

* Mary Orr & Mark Weal, University of Southampton
Digital Flaubert

* Adrian Bell, University of Reading
The Soldier in Later Medieval England

* Kathy Buckner, Centre for Social Informatics, Edinburgh Napier University
e-Participation Projects in Action: a socio-technical perspective

Workshops:

1) Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Arianna Ciula, European Science Foundation & Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford University

2) Visualisation
Manuel Lima, VisualComplexity.com

3) EPrints Respositories: Managing Data for Mash-ups
Leslie Carr & Adam Field

4) Interdisciplinarity & the Media
Jon Copley & Claire Ainsworth

Paper Submissions:

If you are interested in attending, please submit an original paper, of 1500 words or less, describing an idea or concept you wish to present. Please indicate whether you would prefer to produce a poster or perform a 2-minute lightning talk. Papers must be produced as a PDF or in Microsoft Word (.doc) format and submitted through our EasyChair page:

- Register for an easy chair account: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/account_apply.cgi
- Log in: https://www.easychair.org/?conf=interface09
- Click New Submission at the top of the page and fill in the form.

Make sure you:
- Select your preference of lightning talk or poster.
- Select whether you are representing humanities or technology.
- Attach and upload your paper.
If you encounter any problems, please e-mail submissions@interface09.org.uk

Papers should focus on potential (and realistic) areas for collaboration between the Technology and Humanities Sectors, either by addressing particular problems, new developments, or both. Prior work may be presented where relevant but the nature of the paper must be forward-looking. As such, the scope is extremely broad but topics might include:

Technology

* 3D immersive environments
* Pervasive technologies
* Online collaboration
* Natural language processing
* Sensor networks
* The Semantic Web
* Agent based modelling
* Web Science

Humanities

* Spatial cognition
* Text editing and analysis
* New Media
* Linguistics
* Applied sociodynamics & social network analysis
* Archaeological reconstruction
* Information Ethics
* Dynamic logics
* Electronic corpora

Due to the limited number of places, papers will be subject to review by committee and applicants notified by email as to their acceptance. All accepted papers will be published online one week in advance of the conference.

Important Dates:

* Paper Submission Deadline: 1 May 2009
* Acceptances Announced: 18 May 2009
* Conference: 9th-10th July 2009

For further information, please visit the conference website (http://www.interface09.org.uk) or e-mail admin@interface09.org.uk.

On Saturday April 4, 2009, a panel on “Ancient World and e-Science”, organized by the Digital Classicist, was held at the Classical Association Annual Meeting at the University of Glasgow (full abstracts in GoogleDoc). The speakers and titles listed were:

• Ryan Baumann & Gabriel Bodard, 3D Visualization and Digitization of Epigraphic Materials
• Stuart Dunn, Seeing into the Past: Visualization, the ancient world, and the e-Science programme
• Brian Fuchs, Rashmi Singhal, Jazz Mack Smith, & Gregory Crane, PhiloGrid: A Web Toolkit for the Ancient World
• Caroline Macé, Ilse deVos, & Philippe Baret, Can phylogenetics methods help to cure contaminated textual traditions?

There was a slight change to the line-up on the day as Stuart Dunn’s attempts to reach Glasgow were scuppered by the incompetence of a budget airline: the three remaining papers were followed by 20 minutes open discussion, and then slightly early adjournment to the hotel bar.

Baumann spoke about the difficulties of reading, photographing, and visualizing curse tablets in general, and the steatite fragments from Amathous in Cyprus especially, which are translucent and therefore resistent to both normal photography and even the laser imaging used to take high-resolution 3-D images of inscribed objects. He then showed examples of a lead tablet (DT 25) which has degraded further in the century since it was transcribed, and argued that the high quality imaging this project is piloting is an important conservation exercise as well as having potential for improving the interpretation and transcription of the texts. The remainder of the presentation was a demonstration of some of the techniques for taking and manipulating 3-D readings using the laser scanner.

Fuchs gave a detailed history of and report on the PhiloGrid services, created by Imperial College London and the Perseus Project as part of a JISC/NEH Transatlantic collaborative digitization grant from 2008-09. He summarised the objectives and achievements of the project, including the mounting of Perseus web services such as lexical and morphological tools, the construction of a citation framework based on FRBR, and the digitization of new content. He also gave an introduction to and invited all present to attend a workshop on Arabic web services to be held at Imperial College London on Wednesday May 13 (further details to be announced here soon).

Macé and de Vos introduced the work carried out by classicists and generic biologists at the Université Catholique de Louvain on using statistical and probabilistic phylogenetic software to try and reconstruct the stemma of a contaminated manuscript tradition. They tested the phylogenetic algorithms for fitness for this task by creating a fictional manuscript tradition for a small section of the text of Proclus, including both horizontal and vertical contamination. Two phylogenetic methods—parsimony analysis and bootstrap analysis—were applied to the data, with mixed results. Vertical contamination in particular still defeats the generic technologies, but further work may improve the accuracy of such tools. (This work, needless to say, will also result in more robust algorithms and methodologies for the biologists, so this is a true e-Science interdisciplinary collaboration that really does have research interest for both fields.)

Many thanks to all who contributed to this panel, including the audience members who took part in the lively discussion afterward. Clearly there is a call for discussion of e-Science issues at Classics venues.

A very exciting story reported by Xeni Jardin on the Boingboing blog a couple weeks ago (Tech Forensics in Guatemala–first prefigured in a piece two years earlier), that links some of the imaging techniques beloved of we digital philology types with new evidence for human rights abuses in Central America in the 1980s. (I think this is of Digital Classicist significance because there are several cool projects working on sophisticated means to image and decypher damaged, degraded, and fragile documents–not least among which is the EDUCE project in Kentucky, where this blog is hosted.)

This story, which is best read in full at the Boingboing link above, involves an archive of police records including evidence of the abuse and murder of “subversives”–teachers, students, journalists, campaigners, and the like–which was dumped in the basement of an old detention centre and has mouldered and rotted for 25 years. The digitization and decypherment of these records has led to the arrest and prosecution of at least one police office for the murder of a civilian in 1984. Although this is a grim story, it is heartening to hear that the work we do so painstakingly to reconstruct ancient texts has applications with current social value as well. (I’ll keep working on those curse tablets, then!) I don’t know if any digital humanities scholars were involved in this work, but would be interested to hear if anyone has any insight into that.

Something of interest to all digital humanists.

The Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) in collaboration with the Centre for e-Research both at King’s College London has just launched its new Masters Programme in Digital Asset Management. This complements CCH’s existing graduate programmes: MA Digital Humanities, MA Digital Culture and Technology, PhD (Digital Humanities).

There is a promotional flyer with full details at:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/content/1/c6/05/00/84/MADAMleafletfinal.pdf

All details about graduate study at CCH are at:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/cch/pg/

Forwarded for Leif Isaksen from the Antiquist list:

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First Call for Papers

InterFace 2009:
1st National Symposium for Humanities and Technology

9-10 July, University of Southampton, UK.

http://www.interface09.org.uk

InterFace is a new type of annual event. Part conference, part workshop, part networking opportunity, it will bring together postdocs, early career academics and postgraduate researchers from the fields of Information Technology and the Humanities in order to foster cutting-edge collaboration. As well as having a focus on Digital Humanities, it will also be an important forum for Humanities contributions to Computer Science. The event will furthermore provide a permanent web presence for communication between delegates both during, and following, the conference.

Delegate numbers are limited to 80 (half representing each sector) and all participants will be expected to present a poster or a ‘lightning talk’ (a two minute presentation) as a stimulus for discussion and networking sessions. Delegates can also expect to receive illuminating keynote talks from world-leading experts, presentations on successful interdisciplinary projects, ‘Insider’s Guides’ and workshops. The registration fee for the two-day event is £30. For a full overview of the event, please visit the website.

Paper Submissions:

If you are interested in attending, please submit an original paper, of 1500 words or less, describing an idea or concept you wish to present. Please indicate whether you would prefer to produce a poster or perform a 2-minute lightning talk. Papers must be produced as a PDF or in Microsoft Word (.doc) format and submitted through our EasyChair page:

- Register for an easy chair account:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/account_apply.cgi
- Log in: https://www.easychair.org/?conf=interface09
- Click New Submission at the top of the page and fill in the form.

Make sure you:
- Select your preference of lightning talk or poster.
- Select whether you are representing humanities or technology.
- Attach and upload your paper.

If you encounter any problems, please e-mail
submissions@interface09.org.uk

A number of travel bursaries may be available to successful applicants – if you would like to be considered for one, please email bursaries@interface09.org.uk and provide grounds for consideration.

Papers should focus on potential (and realistic) areas for collaboration between the Technology and Humanities Sectors, either by addressing particular problems, new developments, or both. Prior work may be presented where relevant but the nature of the paper must be forward-looking. As such, the scope is extremely broad but topics might include:

Technology

* 3D immersive environments
* Pervasive technologies
* Online collaboration
* Natural language processing
* Sensor networks
* The Semantic Web
* Agent based modelling
* Web Science

Humanities

* Spatial cognition
* Text editing and analysis
* New Media
* Linguistics
* Applied sociodynamics & social network analysis
* Archaeological reconstruction
* Information Ethics
* Dynamic logics
* Electronic corpora

Due to the limited number of places, papers will be subject to review by committee in order to maintain quality and a balanced programme. Applicants will be notified by email as to their acceptance. Accepted papers will be published online one week in advance of the conference.

Important Dates:

* Paper Submission Deadline: 1 May 2009
* Acceptances Announced: 18 May 2009
* Conference: 9th-10th July 2009

Confirmed Speakers

Keynote:
* Dame Wendy Hall, University of Southampton,
President of the Association of Computing Machinery

Insider’s Guides:
* Stephen Brown, De Montfort University
President of the Association for Learning Technology

* Ed Parsons
Geospatial Technologist, Google

* Sarah Porter
Head of Innovation, JISC

Project Showcase:

* Mary Orr & Mark Weal, University of Southampton
Digital Flaubert

* Adrian Bell
The Soldier in Later Medieval England

Workshops:

1) Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Arianna Ciula, European Science Foundation & Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford
University

2) Visualisation
Facilitator TBC

3) Data Management
Facilitator TBC

4) New Media
Facilitator TBC

For further information, please visit the conference website
(http://www.interface09.org.uk) or
e-mail info@interface09.org.uk